The skin gun is not science fiction—it's a prototype medical device that literally sprays skin cells onto burn victims to re-grow skin. Old methods like skin grafts took weeks to heal; the skin gun needs about an hour.

We've heard about the spray-on skin gun back in 2008 but we didn't think it'd become this real, this useful, this fast. Though it is still technically in an experimental stage, the skin gun has already successfully treated over a dozen burn victims. The way it works is by using stem cells from the patient's healthy skin and mixing it with a solution to come up with the spray paint. And combined with that fancy gun, the rest is easy. Doctors say "skin cell spraying is like paint spraying".

The video has some graphic burn images, so don't watch unless you have the stomach for it. This clip will also air on National Geographic's Explorer: How to Build a Beating Heart. Stem cells have long been a point of controversy but this is really wonderful science at work.

My degree is in Biomedical Engineering, and this is the sort of device that would be developed by a company similar to the ones that I work for. Based on my education and experience, this is highly sensationalized and "made for TV". The way in which it is presented is misleading.

-It doesn't matter if they were spraying adult stem cells on the burn: he would not have fully healed back to normal skin in four days.
When they show him in the studio and say "this is what he looked like after four days" his hair had all regrown and the skin was relatively even. Even if this process healed his skin quickly, there would still be a noticeable "cleft" where the new skin joined to the old skin, and I'd imagine it would persist for weeks or months until the newly healed skin regrew all of the vascular structure and regained thickness.
-When someone has substantial burns, you first have to debride the area. Imagine a grill scraper or steel wool being used on the burnt area. You have to scrub away all of the dead skin down to the lowest damaged layer, and all of the skin immediately surrounding it. this means that even smaller burns turn into somewhat larger wounds in the preparation for treatment.
-The clip makes it sound like they sprayed him once and he healed in four days. More likely is that they constantly were taking small skin grafts, putting them in a bioreactor, growing more cells, and spraying him multiple times per day for multiple days.
-In a situation like this, using experimental technology, it would have been HIGHLY documented. Why did they show pictures saying "this is what he MIGHT have looked like" and "this is what a second degree burn looks like". There's no reason that he wouldn't have given permission for them to use actual images of him, and that brings even more suspicion in my mind.

All in all, while the theory is reasonable, the speed at which they suggest he recovered fully to normal skin is, frankly, outrageous and unbelievable.

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Still if this is real enough and works as well as it is said to, if not now but in the future, that's just an amazing thing, and can save countless lives.

Even if this stuff doesn't work as well as advertised, if it can create a layer of skin-like substance that can avoid rejection and prevent infection, that is seriously groundbreaking for burn patients, potentially saving a ton of lives. We can worry about the cosmetic implications later.

Seriously amazing stuff here. Like Aernaroth said, it prevents infection and allows the skin to heal to the point where new skin can be grafted on. We'll forget about the cosmetic implications in the next few years.

Reminds me of this vid I saw a few years back about 'pixie dust' that a medical university used on a hobby shop owner who cut a fingertip on a model airplane propeller. The 'dust', which was composed of dehydrated pig bladder cells, healed not only the finger tip, but also made it grow back.